Drupalpgh.org Development Discussion

Another thing to consider would be working on Drupal Gardens for now and then migrating it to it's own server once work has progressed a little bit.

Well that sounds like something I might be able to help with ;)

I think we need to approach this with a plan, rather than just figuring it out as we go along. I also REALLY think we should develop in a dev environment, and not at our production address. It seems to me like we're getting ahead of ourselves talking about modules and permissions when we haven't even really decided what we want this site to be for.

First Steps

Let's figure out what the aim of this site is. This will inform everything else we decide to do with it - design, architecture, what modules we need, etc.

As I see it, this site should be primarily a marketing vehicle to tell people about the Pittsburgh Drupal community, who we are, where and when we meet, and what are goals are. To this end, desired features would include a calendar of upcoming and past user group meetings or affiliated events, content (transcripts/video) from previous meetings, and perhaps some curated articles. A job board would also be nice, but should not preclude listings on groups.drupal.org. We should push new articles and event notifications via facebook and twitter as well.

I'm -1 for user blogs. However, I'm all for carefully-written, article based type blog with some type of editorial moderation. I think sharing case studies on projects we've built or how-to's on some core functionality / use-cases would be great. We should make sure that the content we're sharing as representative of the group is vetted for accuracy and professionalism. If users want individual blogs, we should link to them from member profiles, and maybe aggregate content from thier feeds.

We just barely started talking about this last meeting. I think we need to reach some consensus on how this project is to proceed and who is responsible for what parts of it. A project coordinator or committee would be a great start - someone to keep things focused and on track.

OG and groups.drupal.org

We already have a great resource for information sharing, Q&A and less-formal blog-type entries at groups.drupal.org. We should invite folks to ask questions and participate there (here?) rather than trying to replicate this functionality. G.d.o is where people in the drupal community go to find out about drupallers in a new city/region or somewhere they might be visiting. It also allows us to cross-post discussions or events of greater interest in other groups as well. So I'm -1 for OG unless you have some particular use-case I'm not thinking of.

On Module Selection

We should choose features based on the desired outcome. I'm all for setting up a public sandbox where we can all try out new features, but I don't think that this site is where that should occur.

On Theming

A custom theme is definitely required here. We want to visually represent our group and it's mission, and to some degree demonstrate the flexibility of the platform and our expertise in working with it. I don't think a boxed theme accomplishes this as well as a custom theme would.

Meeting time.

I'd like to see us use our time at the meeting to agree on a mission for the group (and this site), decide who is responsible for what parts of the project and how it will proceed (what kind of input does/should the group have at what points in the process?), and finalize an agreed upon featureset based on what we want the site to accomplish.

Once decided, we should post this on the dev plan page (which should likely not be a wiki but something that is updated by the projects leader(s) based on discussion in this thread or decisions from the meetings).

This is potentially a great way to grow our group and appeal to new folks in the area who are interested in Drupal. It's worth doing as well as possible. Let's save some time on the 28th to discuss.

I agree with marktfrey. That is what we discussed at the February meeting. We also decided to carry on a conversation in this thread about the site so we could utilize the time in the meeting better. That seems to be working. We are arriving at a consensus about the process.

Keep on discussing process and mission of the group at this time. Save specific modules and themes for later.

Our original/current mission statement was/is:
Supporting the development and distribution of Drupal in Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania.

In discussions a couple of years ago, we also discussed making Drupal in education part of our mission. We meant more than an eduction distribution or use in educational institutions. We also wanted to promote the teaching of Drupal in schools/colleges. This mission is implicit in the current mission statement listed above but we might want to make it explicit.

First, my apologies for missing the meeting on April 4th.

Second, I asked a graphics artist with whom I work to create some possible logos - banners really - that would reflect well on our Drupal Pittsburgh group and website. She came up with several different possible jpegs which I wanted to run by the group, so I created a page at http://drupalpgh.org/logos to display all of the different images.

I also ftp'd five of the images up to the site under sites/all/themes/zeropoint/_custom/headerimg/ so these would rotate on each page load.

Check out http://drupalpgh.org/logos and let me know what you think.

If you are going to use a dark background banner, maybe add some background styles like this so the text does not blend too much and get "lost"

site-name a, #site-name a:hover {

background-color: #333333;
border: 2px solid #111166;
color: #EEEEEE;
padding: 5px;

}

Thats just my 1 minute take on it in FireBug, it could be done better. The selectors are from style-zero.css line 470 so you need to override them both. A semitransparent PNG would make a better background but I'd want to play with it to get a nice look.

Quick edit.. a semitrans png would make a better backgroung COLOR instead of the solid #333333 I suggested. It sounded like I was backhandedly criticizing the logos themselves when I reread my post.

I think that is perfect!

I can vouche for Randy as a Web designer, it would be great to have you handle the site design.

Thanks Ralph, Randy, and Rob for taking the initiative on this. Olivia (who came to our March meetup) is working on some IA / Wireframes based on a few discussions we've had within the group (and within this thread) on the direction of the DrupalPGH site. I'll pass those along as soon as I hear from her.

I'll gladly volunteer my services as a sitebuilder and developer once the design is ready :). Let me know.